Car and Driver's 60th Anniversary: The 1960s

Tests, features, remembrances, and more from the Swinging Sixties.

Car and Driver was born in 1955 as Sports Cars Illustrated, which sounded a bit too much like Sports Illustrated, so it changed to Car and Driver, which sounded a bit too much like Road & Track. By the early 1960s, identity confusion begat falling circulation, so they called in a brilliant advertising copywriter named David E. Davis Jr. to change everything. He cleaned house, firing everybody but the art director (the much-awarded Gene Butera) and started hiring complete unknowns to effect his transformation. John Jerome, a long, tall drink of water from Texas, was brought in. He recommended me, but Davis resisted, as I had once told the CEO of GM what he could do with his Corvette. Denise McCluggage, the motorsports columnist of the New York ­Herald Tribune, talked him into hiring me, and in turn I talked him into hiring one-time contributor Brock Yates, who was working as a police reporter for the Perry, New York, Gazette.

We were determined to set automotive journalism on its ear, to "tell it like it is," in the vernacular of the time. We sneered at car magazines that published puff pieces instead of hard-hitting road tests. We were going to go wherever the truth took us and damn the consequences.

We meant well, but there were . . . limitations. To David E., a well-turned phrase was worth a dozen fact-filled spec panels. The tech editor having been fired, I was given full responsibility for getting the numbers right. So. . . I made it all up. I had econoboxes zipping through the quarter-mile in times that would do credit to a Funny Car. We did one acceleration run on the Jersey Turnpike, in rush-hour traffic, in the rain, starting on the shoulder, showering gravel on the startled drivers behind us.

Experts? None of us on the staff even owned a car. Some of us made no bones about hating cars. My managing editor didn't even have a driver's license.

We weren't the only ones doing the cheating. In one infamous muscle-car test, the cars weren't merely prepped by the car company's PR departments as usual, they were souped-up by racing shops to the point that they could give a Lister Jag a run for its money at Bridgehampton. We wrote it up like they were fresh off the showroom floor.

I wrote a totally fictitious road test of an American compact, in which I claimed that we had the car shipped to Europe to validate its maker's claim that it could beat European sports cars on their own turf. I thought the BS was unmistakable, but nobody seemed to notice.

The most egregious fake was the (Ferrari) GTO versus (Pontiac) GTO shootout. The cars were never within 800 miles of each other, so instead of being able to pose them side by side for a photograph, we could only show them together on the cover in an artist's conception, a painting.

But somehow, thanks to the incredible purple prose of David E. Davis Jr. and Brock Yates, we pulled it off. And that's the truth. Steve Smith

Steve Smith has driven everything from the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile to the Rover turbine that ran Le Mans. He's raced Porsches in the Trans-Am series and was the co-founder of the Cannonball Run. He was the editor of Car and Driver in the '60s, of Motor Trend in the '70s, and of PC Computing in the '80s. Retired, he lives in western New York and is writing his memoirs.